Experience Zero Gravity Space Exploration with ADR1FT on July 15

Hey everyone, my name is Adam Orth. I’m the CEO/Creative Director at Three One Zero. We are so excited to announce that Adrift is releasing for PS4 on PlayStation Store in North America and Europe on July 15.

From the very beginning, our dream was to release Adrift as a PS4 title. My partner Omar Aziz and I sat in a tiny office at a shared desk in Santa Monica, CA and plotted out exactly how to get to this point. It feels incredible to have finally achieved it. We can’t wait for you to experience the game.

I’ve prepared an Adrift FAQ to get everyone up to speed on the game ahead of launch:

What is Adrift?
Adrift is a non-violent, narrative-driven FPX (first-person experience) where the focus is exploration, environment, narrative, and light game mechanics. Our small independent team is made up of veteran AAA game developers. We’ve collectively worked on many AAA shooters, so the idea of making a non-violent FPX was something really exciting to us and a challenge we immersed ourselves in as developers.

What kind of game is Adrift?
Adrift is hard to categorize, but it has a little bit of a lot of things. There’s action, simulation, exploration, mechanics, objectives, puzzles and storytelling. Mostly, we like to think of Adrift as an experience and a meditation revolving around the fantasy of an astronaut in peril.
Many people use the film Gravity as a comparison, but Adrift is actually closer to the films 2001: A Space Odyssey and Moon in terms of experience, tone and theme.

What other games is Adrift similar to?
If you enjoy games like Firewatch, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Gone Home, Dear Esther and Proteus, we think you will appreciate and love Adrift.

How much does Adrift cost?
Adrift will sell for $19.99.

Will there be a physical/retail version of Adrift?
Currently, there are no plans for physical or retail.

How long is Adrift?
An average playthrough of Adrift is 4 hours. It can be shorter or longer, depending on the amount of exploring you do.

What is Adrift about?
Adrift is the story of Commander Alex Oshima who wakes up floating amongst the debris of the destroyed Northstar IV space station with no memory of who she is or of the catastrophic event that took the lives of her crew and a badly damaged EVA suit slowly leaking oxygen.

What do you do in Adrift?
As the only survivor, your goals in Adrift are simply to stay alive and get home safely.
You accomplish this by exploring the wreckage of the Northstar IV in zero gravity, searching for oxygen resources, repairing your damaged EVA suit and re-activating the station’s 4 core system mainframes in order to be able to operate and launch the station’s EEV escape craft.

How is the story delivered in Adrift?
The narrative in Adrift is delivered in 6 unique ways:

Audio logs

Audio terminals

Email terminals

Mission Control communications

Satellite news broadcasts

HAN-IV ADMINISTRA (Northstar IV Computer Assistant)

How is the story told in Adrift?
Just like the Northstar IV station, your EVA suit, and Alex Oshima herself, the story/narrative in Adrift is broken. It’s meant to be discovered as seeds that give you brief glimpses into the lives of Alex and the crew members who did not survive. These seeds allow you grow and create your own version of the story. There is no real, traditional game story structure. It’s up to you to hunt down as much or as little as you like as you explore the wreckage.

How was Adrift created?
Adrift was created using Unreal Engine 4.

Are there multiple endings in Adrift?
Yes.

Do your actions in-game affect the outcome of Adrift?
Absolutely.

What are the gameplay mechanics in Adrift?
Adrift revolves around the player’s EVA suit and has three main gameplay mechanic/systems:

EVA Movement: Adrift takes full advantage of zero gravity, physics and the weightlessness of space. Your EVA suit is operated via intuitive controls mapped to the DualShock 4 that allow players to manipulate and move through the environment in 360°.

EVA Oxygen: Your EVA Propulsion system is damaged and uses oxygen as an emergency propulsion resource. Players must carefully monitor and manage their EVA oxygen level via HUD meter in order to utilize life support and propulsion. Many moment-to-moment decisions have to be weighed carefully as using your shared resource affects everything you do.

Are there multiple gameplay modes in Adrift?
Yes. In addition to the single player experience, Adrift also features:

EVA Training: An unlimited training environment where players can master the use of their undamaged EVA suit.

EVA FREE: Completing each of the 4 game environments unlocks an unlimited oxygen version of each environment where players can explore stress-free, take and share screenshots and stream their gameplay sessions (Note: Trophies can’t be earned in EVA FREE).

Are there Trophies in Adrift?
Absolutely!

Who created the music for Adrift?
Adrift utilizes several well-known classical piano pieces that were performed by Brian Bell of Weezer and features several original music pieces composed and performed by Adam Orth.

What can I expect from Adrift?
Our goal for Adrift is to give you the ultimate astronaut-in-peril fantasy. We want to blow you away with stunning visuals, challenge you with zero-g movement and physics, scare you with the danger of space and most importantly: tell you an emotional story about human characters within a rich, deep universe and fiction.

I have this game in ma radar for quite a while now…since I saw some gameplay videos of it and got word that it was coming to PS4 I immediately got interested on it.You guys sure took your time but I’m glad to see the game finally releasing on PS4…I really like things set in space and this thing to hunt and take care of oxygen is the biggest attractive of Adrift for me.

Thanks for all the details in this FAQ, it really helps me get a clearer picture of what to expect when playing this game. I wish other developers could be this straightforward and save us much of the guesswork :-)

As a few others have already started to ask, I’d love to know if ADR1FT will support PSVR at or near launch in October. The game looks great, and I’ve read stories of the game being demoed on Oculus. If it will be available in VR on PS4, that’s the way I’d prefer to play it, so I would love to know if I can look forward to that.
Great work on the game and good luck to you in the future.

It doesn’t look like there will be PSVR support. Which is a huge shame because I was going to wait for the PSVR version came out to buy this, probably won’t now. Truth be told it would probably need some major graphical downgrades to be able to run on PSVR

Witcher 3 launched at the typical $60 retail price.
The devs are drastically different. CD Projekt Red is a much larger, well established Developer. Being a well established dev provides them the means to secure much more significant funding. Three One Zero which is a new, small, and unproven Indie Dev.

So you pretty much compared an apple to a pancake. Both edible and delicious but not at all like the other one.

thanks for mentioning UE4, but games like Pneuma also used UE4 and had terrible pop-I’m and low-quality texture/filtering problems. can you talk about native rendering resolution, illumination model, texture filtering, and AA employed (if any)?